Crazy Paving (7 page)

‘Shoo!’ said William, waving an arm. The dog tipped its head to one side.

Joanna Appleton closed the door and turned to her husband, who now stood by her side, recovered. They looked at each other, then their faces began to crack. Joanna spluttered.
Her husband bent over and slapped his thigh. They roared.

‘I can’t believe it!’ Joanna squeaked. ‘Oooh . . . oooh . . . I can’t believe it. Works every time . . .’

Bob Appleton was bending over. He had dropped his walking stick and was holding both arms across his stomach. ‘The look – on his—’ He was laughing so much that he began
to snort and cough.

‘Careful dear,’ said his wife, squeakily, ‘you might have one of your turns!’

‘Here,’ Bob Appleton bent and picked up his stick, ‘put that thing back in the cupboard.’

Joanna turned and opened the cupboard door behind her. It was only then that she heard the voice from upstairs, calling crankily, ‘Joanna! Joanna!’

‘Oh dear,’ said Joanna, withdrawing a yellow cotton hankie from her sleeve and wiping the tears from her cheeks.

‘Do you really think we’re in the clear now?’ Bob asked, standing up and straightening his cardigan. ‘Or will they be back next week?’

‘Oh I don’t know, love.’ Joanna’s face became softer and more serious. ‘I don’t think we’ve heard the last, do you?’

‘No, me neither.’

‘Joanna! Joanna!’ The voice came from upstairs.

‘Do you want me to go?’ asked Bob.

Joanna kicked off the purple slippers and pulled the green rubber band out of her hair. ‘No. You put the kettle on. I’ll be down in a minute. Let’s discuss it over a
cappuccino.’

Joanna’s mother was sitting up in bed, gnashing her gums. Her pink hairnet had slid sideways and hung down over her forehead at a rakish angle.

‘What’s all that racket for?’ she demanded. Many afflictions of the aged had come to Joanna’s mother. Deafness was not among them.

‘Oh nothing, Mum,’ Joanna replied. ‘We were just having a bit of a laugh, that’s all.’

‘A laugh?’

Joanna pulled the bedclothes up around her mother’s loose little body. She had taken to wearing pyjamas instead of her nightie but she was so tiny that even the smallest of men’s
sizes hung off her shoulders. Joanna had had to buy seven sets in boys’ sizes, as incontinence was the one elderly habit her mother had embraced with enthusiasm. Mrs Hawthorne’s
favourite top was a lurid dead-blood colour and had small grey helicopters flying from sleeve to sleeve. Joanna drew it across and did up one of the buttons. Then she reached up to adjust the pink
hairnet.

‘Stop fussing Joanna, for God’s sake,’ said her mother.

‘I’m not fussing . . .’

‘Don’t take it off. I’ve told you, I like it.’

‘I’m not taking it off Mum, I’m just putting it straight. It is a nuisance you know, pinning your hair and putting this thing on. I don’t know why we bother.’

‘Just because I’m your mother it doesn’t mean I can’t look my best.’

Mrs Hawthorne had been living with them for eighteen months. It had not been an easy time. Until six years ago, she had occupied a ground floor flat on a nearby housing estate, alone but for a
tiny mongrel with spiky brown fur who skittered from room to room, barking at shadows. Joanna had visited regularly with food and air freshener. The dog was called Pip. While Joanna and her mother
drank tea in the kitchen Pip would stand in front of them with his fur on end and his tiny dripping penis erect, panting for a biscuit.

Then Mrs Hawthorne took to turning on the gas ring but forgetting to light it and tripping over the pattern in the carpet. One day, Joanna visited and discovered her mother pottering around with
one hand tucked inside her cardigan. After some persuasion, she permitted her to withdraw it and look. A dirty handkerchief was wrapped around the index finger which was swollen and blackened with
dried blood. Under pressure, Mrs Hawthorne confessed that she had cut it on a tin can. When a doctor was called, he admitted her to hospital immediately where the finger was found to be gangrenous.
When the hospital doctor discovered she had not visited a GP for seventeen years, he decided to give her a full examination. This resulted in a furious battle during which the doctor had sustained
a small nose-bleed. ‘What are you playing at?’ Joanna had heard her mother shriek from behind the curtain, ‘I only want a plaster for me finger!’

The finger was amputated and the doctor told Joanna that her mother was lucky not to have lost her hand. The examination revealed a variety of other complications. A hysterectomy was found to be
necessary and the removal of other items of intestine were considered. Joanna went home to Bob and informed him sadly, ‘My mother is imploding.’

Mrs Hawthorne took the interference with bad grace. Her theory, which she expounded to anyone who would listen – and several who wouldn’t – was that having been denied the
opportunity to mutilate her for so many years, the medical profession was making up for lost time. Several operations later, she was admitted to the Restview Home for the Elderly in New Cross where
she was expected to do the decent thing and die.

Four years on and fitter than ever, she came to live with Joanna and Bob. She had not liked the Restview home. During the early months, she was regularly apprehended by the night nurse as she
made her way off down the corridor, dressed in her coat and nightie and clutching her favourite china cat. (Pip had been put down. Joanna had taken him to the vet in a wicker cage singing
Alleluia
all the way. She had always hated that dog.) When Bob and Joanna visited she sat in the television room and told them loudly that the other residents were crackers. She made
racist remarks to the sister in charge and reduced a nursing auxiliary to tears by listing her physical deficiencies, one by one, to a passing vicar. Joanna went to see the social services and
arrangements were made to transfer Mrs Hawthorne to the spare room in their house, where she promptly took to bed and refused to move. Mrs Hawthorne had spent a long time fed up about being old.
Safely ensconced in her daughter’s home, she was now going to make the most of it.

‘I’m tired,’ Mrs Hawthorne announced. ‘I’m going to have a kip.’

‘It’s only half past eleven,’ said Joanna. ‘You haven’t even had lunch.’

‘I’m tired,’ she repeated, and yawned unconvincingly, showing two rows of bare gums around which saliva glistened. ‘Stay till I go to sleep.’

This was something she had started recently. So far Joanna had conceded, sitting by her bed until the old lady started snoring. Sooner or later, she was going to have to put her foot down. She
had not spent sixty-six years growing up to have to do this for her own mother. It was the wrong way round.

It was also painful. It reminded Joanna that she too was a mother, and that her daughter was a thin, stupid, middle-aged woman who had achieved nothing and wanted even less. They did not get
on.

How is it, Joanna wondered sometimes, that I turned out to be such a good daughter and wife and such a failure as a mother? How come I got the small things right but not the big one?

She stared at the picture on the opposite wall. Her granddaughter had bought it for them, from the Tate gallery. ‘Some Russian geezer,’ Bob had muttered as he hung it. It was a print
framed in glass, a coloured swirl of rainbows and splodges. Joanna found it a comfort, sitting next to her mother. This was how she imagined death; not as something black but as a mad pattern of
coloured shapes, which mingled and collided: the strands of your life, which – after years of messing about – would finally coagulate and blur. The painting reassured her. It was true.
All things met and ended, one day.

Back at work, William sat at his desk and drew doodles on his spiral notepad. The place was deserted. Richard’s office was locked. Everyone else seemed to be at lunch.
William had sandwiches in his desk drawer but he had eaten two large sausage rolls in a café by Surrey Docks station. He had waited for his train gazing out over the stark greys and browns
of Rotherhithe. There is more to life than this, he had thought gloomily. There is more to life than visiting mad people in ugly places.

Annette arrived back from lunch. He wandered over as she was unbuttoning her coat. ‘You’re wet,’ he said conversationally. Her cream-coloured mac was peppered with dark spots
of rain. ‘When is Richard back?’

‘Didn’t you know?’ she said, sitting down and rummaging through her bags. ‘He was in that awful accident in Surrey last night. He’s alright, but it was really
close, apparently. His back is bad but he said he should be fit by next week. He’ll be ringing in for messages.’

‘Nothing trivial I hope.’

‘Do you want to see what I bought?’ Annette pulled a lemon-coloured blouse out of a plastic bag and held it up. ‘In the sale, look. For the summer. To cheer myself up.’
The blouse was sleeveless, with a small white collar and large round buttons. The light from the window shone through it. ‘The assistants in there drive me mental,’ Annette said as she
folded it up. ‘They’re so slow.
How would you like to pay?
One of these days I’m going to say,
Oh, with rawlplugs
.’

Suddenly, William shivered. Annette chattered on but he was not listening to what she was saying. He was listening, rather, to the sound of her voice. It tinkled against his ear. While she
talked, she pushed her bags under her desk and lifted up her handbag. She withdrew a small can of hairspray and a round brush. Her hands were small, her fingernails immaculate. ‘Won’t
be a mo,’ she said, and breezed past him.

He stood for a moment, watching her empty chair, as if he was surprised to find that she was no longer in it. Then he turned and went back to his desk. The office was still empty. He sat down
and stared straight ahead.

William had only been in love once, some years ago, during his first year as a probationary surveyor. He was working for the borough of Hammersmith and Fulham; external repair
works. He had bounced out of Thames Polytechnic ready to take on the world and found, to his surprise, that the world was not interested in a fight. He had his first job within two months and it
was easy. He used one tenth of the knowledge he had gained while he was training and promptly forgot the rest. He was still sharing a flat with student friends who remained unemployed, apart from
one who was going on to do an MSc. Now that he was a member of the working majority, their ideas irritated him. He was a grown-up. He was moving on.

He took two secretaries from work out to lunch, on separate occasions. One was very pretty but silent and awkward. The other was plain and wouldn’t stop talking. He had no intention of
seeing either on a regular basis but felt he should do it for the practice. There was no one else at work he was remotely interested in, but sooner or later they would come along and he had every
intention of being ready when they did. Grown-ups were.

The months passed and the person he had prepared himself for did not arrive. He started taking Linda, the talkative secretary, to the cinema on Friday nights. Then he had sex with her and
stopped. The next week, during an emotional scene in a pizza parlour, she accused him of losing interest the minute he had got what he wanted. This was not true. He had never been interested in the
first place. He had talked her into sex because he felt it was expected of him. Telling Linda the truth would have hurt more than letting her believe the lie, so instead he looked at her
sympathetically and said, ‘I’m sorry.’ She slapped his face.

For a few weeks, things were a little tricky. She refused to do his typing. She kept bursting into tears unexpectedly and rushing to the toilet. Word went round that he was a bastard. He was
invited to join the staff football team.

One Saturday night, he and his flatmates were at their local, drinking soapy beer and trying to have a discussion. Towards closing time, Bob, the MSc student, came back from the bar rubbing his
hands. ‘Just met a mate, lads. Party.’ A party was the last thing William felt like but it was easier to trot along than it was to make an excuse and go home on his own. The party was
in a large terraced house just round the corner from the pub. William’s heart sank as soon as he entered. He had spent his three years as a student doing this kind of thing. He was not in the
mood for regression.

They headed for the kitchen which was bright with yellow light. There was a table that groaned with the weight of booze. He helped himself to a can of lager and then left the lads poking around
the bottles. There was only a handful of people around. Those not standing in the kitchen had congregated on the stairs. He stood by them listlessly for a few moments until it was clear nobody was
going to speak to him.

In the front room, there were two couples sitting in opposing corners, talking quietly. Untouched bowls of peanuts and crisps were scattered here and there, on the mantelpiece, the window sills.
He went straight out again. A heavy beat was booming from the back room. Above the door was a handwritten sign which read, ‘IN HERE TO FUNK’.

The room was stripped of furniture and the carpet had been rolled up to reveal bare boards. Large sheets of tin foil had been hung on the walls. Inside, two huge speakers were blasting out a
beat which hurt his ears and vibrated beneath his feet. A bare red light bulb hung from the ceiling. It was so gloomy that at first he thought the room was empty.

She was standing against the wall, close to an open sash window. Her body was turned away from him and she was gazing out into the darkened garden. She was holding a can of beer in one hand,
clutching it to her chest. In the darkness he could just make out an untidy bunch of hair and a long, dark cardigan over leggings and boots. He walked towards her. She turned, still clutching the
can. She looked him up and down. She smiled. He took the hint and fell in love.

They saw each other two or three times a week, as often as William dared to suggest. Her name was Ellen. She was twenty-four, two years older than him (although as far as William was concerned
it could have been two decades). She liked films and driving fast and take-away Chinese. She laughed easily. One night, in the bathroom of his shared flat when everyone else was away, she gave him
his first blow job.